Cruise disaster: Chaos reigned as order came to abandon ship

The Costa Concordia had been at sea just two hours when its 3,200 passengers
and 1,000 crew first had an inkling of the disaster that was about to engulf
them.

By Patrick Sawer in Rome, Nick Squires in Porto Santo Stefano and Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter

10:22PM GMT 14 Jan 2012

Passengers enjoying the on-board magic show reported a lurch followed by a shudder; diners, picking over a starter of squid, sautéed mushrooms and salad, reported the lights going out and the smashing of glasses and plates as they fell from tables and crashed to the floor.

The ship – for whatever reason – had hit a reef on its way from a port near Rome to its next stop, Savona in the north west of Italy.

It was due to arrive the next morning. The Costa Concordia never got further than 200 yards from the tiny island of Giglio off the coast of Tuscany.

A member of the crew – a cabaret singer from Birmingham – recalled watching a film in her cabin when the ship tilted. Her television then “went flying to the floor”. The terror and the chaos that came next was in stark contrast to the holiday atmosphere that had preceded it.

Having enjoyed a leisurely dinner, Julia Zhou, 61, a freelance fashion consultant from New York, and her sister returned to their cabin. Outside, it was getting dark and the pair were heading for bed.

“Suddenly there was an enormous bang. It was like an earthquake – everything fell on the floor,” recalled Miss Zhou. “The lights went out – there was a blackout.”

At 9.30pm in Milano, one of the ship’s five restaurants, Christine Hammer, 65, from Bonn, was at the second dinner sitting.

“Suddenly we heard a crash. Glasses and plates fell down and we went out of the dining room and we were told it wasn’t anything dangerous,” she said.

Luciano Castro, another passenger at the second sitting, said: “We were having supper when the lights suddenly went out. We heard a boom and a groaning noise and all the cutlery fell to the floor.”

Alan and Laurie Willits, a Canadian couple celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary, were watching the magic show when they felt a lurch as if from a “severe steering manoeuvre” followed by a “loud scraping sound along the side of the ship”.

“As soon as we all heard the noise, the magician was off – he didn’t hang around,” said Mrs Willits, 52.

As the magician fled, the rest of his act was stuck on stage.

Rosalyn Rincon, 30, from Blackpool, was inside a box during the magic show when, she said, “I realised that everything stopped. The music stopped.”

Everything on the stage fell on top of her and other people in the act. “There was no signal as to what was going on until about 30 minutes into it,” she said.

Her boyfriend, an engineer officer on the vessel, told her that there was a blackout and the ship crashed into something.

“They told us there was a fire,” she said.

Then another blackout occurred, and the ship went into darkness, she said. She put on her life vest in her cabin and about 15 minutes later, “the captain of the ship told us it was an electrical problem,” she added. “We ran to our cabin and grabbed what we could,” said Mrs Willits.

“There was very sketchy information, and they just said there was a generator problem. An alarm sounded but we didn’t know that it meant that water was coming into the ship.”

Reassured by a Tannoy announcement that it was “just a technical problem” and that there was nothing to fear, passengers largely stayed calm at least for those first 45 minutes.

It may not have helped, according to some witnesses, that many of the crew were from Asia, and didn’t speak much Italian, English, French or German – the main languages spoken by the ship’s passengers.

But there are suggestions that some crew members may have paid a terrible price; their quarters were in the lower of the 13 passenger decks, where divers are now searching.

In the fourth-deck restaurant, Fernando Tofanelli, a 38-year-old Italian studying English in London, said: “I was sitting down to dinner at around nine, when I suddenly heard a very loud noise and felt an enormous bang.

“At first I thought it was something mechanical with the engine, but after a few seconds we felt the ship starting to lean over from one side to the other. Plates and tables were flying all over the place and people were falling over as the tilting got worse. People were shouting and screaming and it was absolute chaos.

“At first the crew of the ship said it was nothing serious and they didn’t do anything to begin emergency procedures.”

Nobody, it seems, expected a state-of-the-art, £350 million cruise ship to encounter such a problem. Even with the ship listing – first one way and then the other – not all the passengers realised at this stage just how serious their predicament was.

But as the ship lurched, so the realisation of the seriousness of the situation began to dawn, especially among the crew.

Amelia Leon, 22, the cabaret singer from Birmingham, was in her cabin; she had been watching a DVD with her boyfriend.

“Suddenly the boat went on its side and we were like 'this is a bit strange’,” said Miss Leon, a veteran of cruise ships despite her youth.

“Because it wasn’t moving it was just tilting more to the side and suddenly the TV went flying to the floor and the lights went out and then I started to really panic. I was like 'Oh my god, what’s going on?”

Miss Rincon talked of the moments immediately after the captain had sounded the order to abandon ship: “Then panic set in. The life rafts weren’t opening. We had to let the passengers go first.

“The ship was going down. The water was rising. And I just thought there was only one thing to do – jump and swim – and there were mountains nearby that we could get to.”

With the vessel listing severely she admits she was terrified.

“We were going higher and higher, and were in a vertical position. I was holding on to the railing. All we could [hear] was noise and creaks. It was very, very scary It was just chaos.”

Many passengers had to be carried to the lifeboats. Some had fainted and others had injuries to their face or body.

Crew were left with a choice of jumping into the water and trying to swim ashore or waiting for a lifeboat, which Miss Rincon eventually did after all the passengers had left. “We were literally thrown into the boat,” she said.

Miss Zhou, who had taken a sleeping pill, suddenly realised what was happening. “I looked out of the cabin and everyone was putting on life jackets – but nobody had told us,” she said.

Out on the decks, panic and fear had inevitably spread. The announcement was made to abandon ship, signalled by horns blaring amid the darkness; the mad scramble had begun to get into lifeboats.

But by then – at about 10.30pm and an hour after the initial collision – vital time had already been lost. The ship was listing badly; water was flooding into the lower cabins and it was not easy to launch the lifeboats. Some passengers jumped into the sea. At least one is thought to have died that way, suffering a heart attack as he entered the cold water.

The evacuation was clearly easier on one side of the ship than the other. On the side now tilted closest to the sea, the boats could be lowered fairly easily. Some passengers and crew even jumped straight into the water and swam to shore.

But on the side now raised up toward the sky, many lifeboats appeared to have been rendered useless, unable to be lowered down into the water.

One witness described seeing a man in his 70s in a wheelchair struggling to get into one of the lifeboats. Many others – because by now the ship was leaning so steeply – could not be launched at all.

Women and children were supposed to go first, but fathers, desperate to be with their families, ignored the order. This was very much every man for himself.

Some passengers even fought with each other to get on to the boats.

“There was a lot of panic, screams, children crying,” said Giuseppe D’Avino, a pastry chef from Modena. “Some passengers came to blows as they tried to get in the lifeboats.”

Fabio Costa, a crewmate, who tried to bring order to the chaos, said: “We were giving priority to kids and women and trying to leave the men until last, but they were not accepting it because it was their families.

“So that is why there was a huge confusion. We were just trying to stop people getting stepped on.”

As the vast ship listed, the Ananias family from Los Angeles were on their hands and knees, crawling along stairways and near-vertical hallways to get to the top deck.

“Have you seen Titanic? That’s exactly what it was,” said Valerie Ananias, 31, a schoolteacher who was travelling with her sister and parents.

“We were crawling up a hallway, in the dark, with only the light from the life vest strobe flashing,” said her mother Georgia,

“We could hear plates and dishes crashing, people slamming against walls.”

Tears welling up, she told how an Argentine couple handed their three-year-old daughter to her, unable to keep their balance as the ship lurched to the side and the Ananias family found themselves standing on a wall.

“He said 'Take my baby,’” Mrs Ananias said, covering her mouth in realisation of the horror.

“I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn’t want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn’t hold her. I thought that was the end and I thought they should be with their baby.”

Her daughter Valerie whispered: “I wonder where they are?”

Mr Tofanelli recounted: “After about an hour the ship finally sounded several blasts on the horn, and that was the signal to go to the lifeboats, but by now people were pushing each other to get out of the way, and some were leaping over the side into the sea.

“They didn’t have enough lifeboats for all the passengers because some appeared to be underwater from the ship leaning over.

“Fortunately I was above the water line, but I could see it climbing higher and higher towards us. Some of the crew didn’t seem to even know how to release the lifeboats or start the lifeboat engines once they were down on the water. The crewman in charge of our lifeboat was absolutely ashen-faced, he just didn’t know what to do.” Some of the lifeboats could only be launched by cutting through cables or smashing the fixings with a hammer.

“It took hours for people to get off the ship,” said Mr Costa. “It was easier for people to jump in the sea because we were on the same level as the water so they just started to swim.”

Agata Martisi, 40, and her husband Falici, 43, who had been celebrating their 22nd wedding anniversary, were left dangling in a lifeboat because the cable had become snagged.

“It was terrifying,” said Mrs Martisi. “One of the cables of our lifeboat snagged and we were stuck there for 10 minutes before they managed to lower it.

“The boat made it to a nearby island where the local priest opened up the church for us and gave us all blankets to keep warm.

“It was absolutely traumatic. As the lifeboat was leaving the ship, we could see it leaning right over on its right-hand side. We can’t have been very far from the coast when it began because we could see the lights quite nearby.

“Thank God I left my daughters at home. One of them is only seven. We’ve managed to speak to them and tell them we’re all right. There was no help or apparent co-ordination from the crew. We felt as if we’d been abandoned.”

The island, with a population of just 700, was soon overwhelmed.

Jim Yates, 64, a deputy sheriff from Louisiana, who was accompanied by his wife, Margaret, said: “One boat fell into the water after a cable that had got stuck was cut with a hatchet. It was panic. People were jumping into lifeboats even when they were full.

“It didn’t seem to be a case of passengers first, the crew were just taking care of themselves. Basically the Costa people were taking care of the Costa people.”

The evacuation took hours. By 3am, there were still as many as 100 people on board, largely crew.

Among them was Rose Metcalf, 24, from London, one of eight British women in the dance troupe.

“My name is Rose, it’s Friday 13th and I’m one of the last survivors still on-board the sinking cruise liner off the coast of Italy,” she wrote in what she may have thought were her last words on Facebook, the social networking site. “Pray for us to be rescued.”

Miss Metcalf was one of the last people left aboard the Costa Concordia; she was eventually airlifted off by helicopter to a nearby naval base. Others had made their way to shore by swimming. They were freezing, many wearing evening wear, or nightclothes.

Miss Zhou, recovering from her ordeal, was yesterday as angry as she was relieved. “The ship’s management lied to us,” she said, “A lot of passengers are saying they want to sue. People died last night for nothing. If there had been more warning … but there was no safety drill, no alarm, no knock on the door.

“The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is coming up and we were talking about it before we came on the cruise.

“I told my sister 'Don’t worry, this is the 21st century’. But the handling of this accident was as bad as on the Titanic. I just want to get home to New York.”